How Do You Organize ALL Those Clothes?

The 4 Moms of 35 Kids are discussing how to organize all the clothes in a large family.

Truly, this is a challenge. If a large family mom doesn’t have some kind of system and limit to the amount of clothing that dwells in the house it can look like a bomb went off in the children’s clothing section of Goodwill.

I mean, that’s what I’ve heard. Ahem.

I do a seasonal clothes switch twice a year and allow each child to choose 7 shirts, 4 bottoms, and 4 dresses from a stash of large, plastic bins we keep in the garage.

The bins are labeled with sizes and season. This is an old picture. I gave up on the boy/girl labels since we haven’t been to produce a boy in over 15 years and 6 children.

Each child that shares a bedroom also shares a dresser and is assigned certain drawers in which to keep clothes.

I also recently bought each child her own pop up hamper. The idea is for all dirty clothes to go into each person’s own hamper and be washed by the child who owns the hamper. The idea is to eliminate, “She took my favorite shirt!” or “Those are MY pants she’s wearing!” Time will tell if this idea works.

Be sure to check out what the rest of The 4 Moms team does to manage the clothes in their families:

We do something similar – though it’s one bin for each size and 10 outfits per season, plus 2 Sunday outfits (that is, outside of the baby/toddler stage – then I believe I have 15-20 outfits per size). It’s crazy though when you’re working with both boy and girl bins especially during season change. (I have 3 boys, 1 girl and one baby girl on the way!) I also think that each child decides to put on a growth mid-season and 2 weeks off of anyone else growing!

My question is what do you do with your winter gear? Do you store it in with your regular clothes?

I know this won’t be feasible for everyone, but I have all of our winter coats, mittens, gloves, etc in our coat closet all year long. Since my kids are so close together, when one is growing out of a coat, the next one is ready for it. I also buy coats big and have my children wear them for at least 2 years! I have a tub that we put all of the hats, scarfs, gloves, etc in!

I love the idea of limiting the amount of clothing they have…. due to gifts and grandparents our kids are crammed full… it’s really a mixed blessing. I love the idea of a certain # of tops/bottoms and “nice” clothes/outfit. Honestly they only wear their favorites anyway

With the next season change I am definitely going to adapt this concept and only save (in plastic bins) a certain # of clothes, too!! So the bins don’t overflow, too!!

Having each child do his/her own laundry is so tempting, but I think it would cost us more because it would mean more loads being washed. Or do your children just throw everything in together? I have a difficult time tossing jeans in with soft cotton jammies or a nice church shirt/dress, or heavy fleece stuff with nicer clothes. Is this a non-issue for you?

To the person who asked about winter gear, we live in WI and everything has to be put in the attic as we only have 3 tiny closets in the entire house. So we throw all the winter stuff in tubs and to the attic it goes.

I store our clothes that same way also. I keep my bins up in the attic. We can walk up there so I can just head on up there when I need to pull out the size that the kids need. I wish I had the dedication of only letting my kids have 7 shirts. OH how much that would save me on laundry. WOW. Now I am thinking OH to have my kids do their own laundry…HUMMM you have me thinking on this one…

I don’t look forward to moving to another climate where they actually have different seasons throughout the year. Right now we have it easy. Same clothes year round.

So we limit each child to about 8 outfits each. We have a children’s closet just off the laundry room. They’re all folded except for boys’ Sunday shirts and girls’ Sunday dresses. Those hang up.

Everyone has their clothing lined up on their open shelf from left to right: Pajamas, shirts, shorts, pants.

On the floor under the shelving are bins I bought at back to school sales. The bins are labeled with names and hold socks and undies. The twins share a bin. And anyone still in diapers has socks and onesies.